


The Hard Sell

by bomberqueen17



Series: The Lost Kings [7]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars: Shattered Empire
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Cassian Andor: Murder Muffin, Gen, Kes Dameron's Awakening Into Being A Badass, Mention of pregnancy, Rebellion Origin Stories, Sassy K-2SO, canon-typical sarcasm, childbirth discussion (mild), tw mention of seizures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-12 19:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10497534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Cassian Andor is tapped to retrieve a compromised operative from the hands of the Empire. Only, the target's not an operative, and he doesn't really know anything. Too bad he might have to die anyway.Meanwhile, Shara Bey has to make some hard decisions.





	1. Chapter 1

“Cassian Andor,” Bail Organa said. “Good to see you well.” He was speaking Iberican, which was the sort of thing that sent up Cassian’s internal alarm flags. But Cassian was a spy, so it was easy enough to keep his expression neutral.

“You as well, sir,” Cassian said politely. It was only what he deserved, for having been so stupid as to stay in one place for more than two hours. That sort of thing got you roped into things like this.

Organa leaned in a little. He really was, Cassian thought admiringly, a commanding presence. Made you feel better about him probably asking you to go and die for him, really. Throw in deploying the mother-tongue, an implicit in-group signifier that called to mind his past interventions in Cassian’s life, and it was all around a really compelling show. The guy was so goddamn genuine, was probably the worst part. He’d do what it took to achieve the goals of the Cause, even get you killed for it, but he’d also very genuinely mourn your death, which made it all worse. “How good is your memory of Molo Untar?”

Cassian didn’t hide the way the name hit him like a raindrop down the collar. “Very good,” he said. Oh, Organa was pulling out all the stops. This was going to be a really nasty gig, whatever it was.

“You two worked together on a number of missions, did you not?” Organa asked.

“Yes,” Cassian said. _Until you sent him to die_ , he did not say, because he knew he didn’t have to.

“You met Untar’s family, yes?” Organa said.

Cassian gave Organa a considering look, letting his eyes follow the line of the exquisitely-hemmed edge of Organa’s cloak. “The bright-eyed moppet, the firebrand diplomat with the glossy hair, and the clever witch,” he said. Molo’s son, wife, and… he’d never been really clear on who the witch really was in absolute terms, but it hadn’t really mattered. Oh, the wife hadn’t really been married to him, either. Had she? Well, details. “Which of them is a traitor to you?” He raised his eyebrows. “If you think I have any hold on them, all I am to them is the man who told them Molo was dead.”

“I don’t need leverage against them,” Organa said, sitting back slightly in amusement. “My word, you may have been in this business too long.”

“I have seen a lot of things,” Cassian said. “But there’s no call to be indirect, sir. You want me to do something extremely difficult or unpleasant, so you might as well go ahead and ask.”

“I see,” Organa said. “I’ll cut to the chase, then. I spend too much of my time among politicians, do forgive my prevarication.” He leaned forward again, a near-silent rustle of exquisitely-expensive fabric against the cheap plasteel of the table. “Then you remember Lita Dameron.”

“The glossy-haired firebrand,” Cassian said. He’d liked her, but she was the kind of fanatic you died for. He knew the type extremely well. Molo had figured on dying for her, had gone into their relationship planning on it, and he hadn’t exactly been wrong.

“Yes,” Organa said, smiling a little. “Well, she began to work with the Rebellion.”

“I thought the whole point with her was that she stayed clean,” Cassian said. “Like the Queen. They keep their hands clean, really clean.” It was like, rule number one. An operative would die rather than implicate the diplomats who were supposed to be clean.

A constant small portion of Cassian’s awareness was taken up in the knowledge that he was likely to die screaming under torture, still disavowing any knowledge of any of the Organas despite, or perhaps because of, too many conversations like this.

“She…there was a crisis,” Organa said, “and she intervened to save a mission. It was,” and he grimaced. “Unavoidable.”

“That’s regrettable,” Cassian said, and he meant it. He considered for a moment. “The Empire got her?”

“Ironically,” Organa said, “no. They came for her, but their intelligence was not… clear.”

Cassian frowned. They surely did not come to Alderaan for her. “How so?” he asked.

“They took the wrong Dameron,” Organa said.

To Cassian’s knowledge, there were only two Damerons; the clever witch had a different surname. He thought about the bright-eyed moppet, and closed his eyes for a second. So they went to wherever the Dameron family was staying, and took the easiest suspect. “They took the kid,” he said, and opened his eyes. “Why?”

“The kid is twenty,” Organa said, mouth curling sardonically, “and six feet tall, and has a wife.”

Cassian blinked. “Oh,” he said. Twenty… well, okay, yes, it had been a few years. “I guess kids do that when you’re not looking.”

“He’s in the hands of the Empire,” Organa said. “Here’s the thing. Two things. Number one, he’s clean. He’s absolutely clean. His mother raised him to stay away from any of the resistance movements, he’s very deliberately spent his entire life above reproach. He knows nothing. But, number two, he’s spent his whole life aboveboard. He has no training at resisting interrogations.”

“He’ll give you up,” Cassian said, drawing the conclusion. “I mean, he’s been around you his whole life, he surely knows.”

Organa shrugged, mouth tugging to one side. “He won’t give them the proof they need,” he said. “But if they break him and convince him to testify, it’s one more strike against me. Enough strikes and my enemies can move. If they break him thoroughly enough, they could probably get him to lie for them, and it would be all the more convincing given who he is. They certainly know who his father was, and that his people have been given protection by Breha and myself.”

“I see,” Cassian said.

“The other likelihood is that they’ll break him and release him, and he will, of course, come to me, because I have always protected his family in the past,” Organa said. “And they will use that as proof, regardless of what he’s told them or not.”

Cassian sighed, looking at his hands. “Do we know where he’s being held?”

“We do,” Organa said.

Cassian nodded slightly. “You’d better give me the details,” he said. “But you don’t think an extraction is likely to work?”

Organa chewed on his lower lip, looking deeply unhappy. “I want an extraction,” he said. “Of course I told Lita I would order an extraction.”

“But you’d want the mission to actually succeed, correct?” Cassian asked, resigned.

Organa sighed heavily. “Yes, it’s crucial that it does,” he said. He tilted his head a little. “It doesn’t help you to know this, but the kid just got married and is expecting a child of his own.”

Cassian gave Organa a deeply unimpressed look. “Why would you even tell me that?” he asked. “What am I supposed to do with that knowledge?”

“I just wanted to share a little of my joy about all this,” Organa said, heavy with irony, spreading his hands in a _giving_ sort of gesture. “I knew you’d appreciate it.”

“You’re very generous, sir,” Cassian said bitterly.

“Dameron is wearing a tracker,” Organa said, “and the Empire seems not to have noticed.”

Cassian nodded slowly. “That makes it interesting,” he said.

“Well,” Organa said. “That’s why we think they’re planning to release him. Odds are good they _have_ noticed, and plan to use that. Clearly he’s important to someone, and they have recognized that.”

“They’re not just hoping to get his mother,” Cassian concluded.

“No,” Organa said. “They’re trying for me.”

 

~~

 

“So you’re telling me you have some sort of sentimental attachment to this person,” K-2SO said, as if that were the weirdest thing he’d ever heard.

Cassian shot K2 a look. “That’s not what I said.” He went back to his preflight check.

“Well then what is the purpose of telling me you knew his father?” K2 asked.

“Context, K2,” Cassian said.

“Is it relevant context?” K2 asked.

Cassian sighed. “Maybe not,” he said.

K2 tapped his fingers on the dashboard before reaching over and making an adjustment. Cassian clicked his tongue at him in annoyance, but he was right; Cassian rolled his eyes and waved him off. “I think you do have a sentimental attachment,” K2 said shrewdly, watching him. “I think you’re telling me so I’ll know to watch out for it.”

“I think you don’t know anything about sentiment,” Cassian said, “so maybe you’d better keep your suppositions to yourself.”

“Help me categorize your relationship to this person,” K2 said. “You worked with his father. Was that a professional relationship, a personal relationship, or a romantic relationship?”

“K2,” Cassian said, “I don’t think that’s a fruitful line of speculation.”

“Nonsense,” K2 said. “You taught me to look for people’s emotional connections, that’s how you bring them down.”

“You’re on the wrong track,” he said. “This is a favor to Bail Organa and he picked me because, number one, I was nearby, and number two, I’ll be easier for the grieving mother to take.”

“Because of your sentimental connection,” K2 concluded.

Cassian sighed. “That’s not-- fine, K2, sure, it’s a sentimental connection.”

“I knew it,” K2 said smugly. “I knew it!”

 

~~

 

K2 could pick up on the tracker’s frequency, which was handy. What wasn’t handy was that it meant Cassian had to bring him along when he’d much rather have left him parked somewhere minding the ship.

But he proved invaluable, because just as they were preparing to infiltrate the installation, K2 put a hand out and grabbed Cassian by the arm. “He’s on the move,” he said.

“What, from--”

“Give the rate of speed, he’s on a spacecraft,” K2 said.

“Shit,” Cassian said. He’d spent all day working out the sentry routine for this installation, after having spent two days researching the layout and staffing. It fucking figured.

It was possible they’d noticed and removed the tracker, and were bringing it somewhere to see who followed, but it was literally the only lead Cassian had, so he really had no choice but to follow it.

 

The ship with Dameron’s tracker on it flew a pretty straightforward trajectory, and landed on a nominally Imperial-controlled planet that in practice mostly did what it liked and kept itself away from notice. There was no Rebellion presence to speak of, on the planet, and Cassian had no contacts there.

“Why Garel,” he said, staring at the map on the nav computer. “Why would they go to Garel.”

“I do not have access to the full intelligence briefing on the planet,” K2 said, and he sounded a little fretful. “I cannot provide a strategic analysis of this destination.”

“We’ll have to go with whatever’s in my feeble meat brain,” Cassian said, leaning back in his seat and stretching his tired shoulders. They were letting the kid go, was what it was, very deliberately-- it was unlikely they’d just send the tracker there, but they had to know it was on the kid, there was no way they didn’t know about it, even if apparently the kid himself hadn’t known about it. He sighed, and rolled his neck. He was never going to sleep in a real bed again, that was something he’d just sort of resigned himself to. “They’re going to drop him on a neutral planet and see which way he runs. Now, why this planet, though?”

“This child,” K2 said, “you said he was technically an adult, though?”

“He is,” Cassian said. He rubbed his face. “Turned twenty-one a couple weeks back, he’s definitely an adult in pretty much every human legal system.”

“Well,” K2 said. “Perhaps he has friends on this planet. Maybe that’s the first thing he did, was tell them where to drop him off.”

“I’m sure he’s never been here,” Cassian said, and then it hit him. “Oh. Of course.”

“How do you know he’s never been here?” K2 asked.

“Because he’s a cargo loader by trade and he works with Fronteras,” Cassian said. He scrambled himself upright as he thought it through. “Fronteras has no presence on Garel. A rival gang controls the docks there.”

“Oh,” K-2SO said, absorbing that.

“They’ve released him on approximately the most hostile neutral planet they could find,” Cassian said. He rubbed his face. “It’s not just-- Fronteras is made up almost entirely of Ibericans. Whether or not he identifies himself as being with them or not--” Molo had spoken Basic with a faint accent, fainter than Cassian’s own, but still noticeable. Cassian hadn’t spoken to Lita at length, and not at all to the kid, but it was real likely the kid had a noticeable accent like his father’s. “He might not look obviously, you know,” and Cassian gestured to his own face. Molo’s skin had been darker than his, stronger-featured, marked with tattoos; in the holo, the kid’s face was unmarked but similar in coloring and bone structure. Cassian could sometimes, depending on haircut and dress, pass without being noticed as particularly Iberican unless he opened his mouth; Molo had not been able to no matter his presentation. “But as soon as he opens his mouth. I don’t think there’s anybody Iberican on Garel, it’s not a good place to be.”

Sometimes the gang had a good protective influence, but sometimes it worked the opposite way.

“Look-- obviously-- you-- know,” K2 echoed, clearly lost.

Cassian rubbed his forehead. “Ethnic,” he said. “Fuck, I’m like. The last person in the entire Rebellion to send on this fucking mission.”

The Empire was counting on Dameron getting rescued, and had hedged their bets by putting him somewhere he wouldn’t be able to use his connections to get himself innocuously home. Whether that meant the kid was smart or not, whether that meant they didn’t think they’d really broken him or not, Cassian wasn’t prepared to draw a conclusion. But he knew it had just taken this mission straight past the _pain in the ass_ zone and into _really sincerely dangerous_.

“I am not clear on the meaning of _ethnic_ in this context,” K2 said.

Cassian let out his breath and sagged in his chair. He was fluent in five languages, but he had accents in all of them, because it was nearly impossible to hide that kind of thing. His best bet would be to try to mask his Iberican accent in Basic by adopting a different one, but he wasn’t sure he could manage to do that. Iberican was so innocuous an accent to have in almost every dialect on almost every world, he’d never really bothered with it. Spywork depended on keeping your stories straight, and keeping your stories straight depended a lot on not using very much subterfuge in the first place.

“I don’t think I can explain it to you,” Cassian said, “so let me just-- summarize. What this means-- this kid, and I, we’re both Iberican, we both look distinctive and we both have accents when we speak. There was a nasty scrap over territory on this planet and the faction that was mostly Ibericans lost it and got driven off, like, ten-fifteen years ago. So the upshot is, he and I are both gonna stand out in this place, and it’s not going to be easy to get him out of there unnoticed. I bet the Empire did this on purpose just to see who came for him.”

“Could we call for backup?” K-2SO asked.

Cassian sucked on his teeth for a moment, considering the nav computer display like it might hold an answer. “Literally anyone else could do this mission,” he said. “But we don’t have time.”

“I could go after him,” K2 offered. “I don’t have an accent.”

“It’s a neutral planet,” Cassian said, “and the Empire almost never hangs around here. They’d murder you for scrap in a blink, don’t think you’re safe either.”

“I can defend myself,” K2 said.

“And you think this traumatized kid is going to turn himself in,” Cassian said.

“You think he’d be able to escape me?” K2 didn’t sound worried.

Cassian shook his head. “I have no idea what this kid is like,” he said. “If he’s like his father at all, he’ll drill you between the eyes before you’ve even spotted him.”

“He’s worked as a cargo loader his whole life,” K2 said. “From what you’ve said, his father spent his entire life a fugitive and guerrilla.”

“Could go either way,” Cassian said. “If they had him hooked up to an interrogation droid for any amount of time, he might just drop dead. He might be a raving lunatic. I’m not counting on him coming quietly with me anyway. I don’t know what I’m walking into. I just know it’s going to be a huge pain in the ass.”

“Well,” K2 said. “He’s been in the hands of the Empire for what, two weeks? Either way, he’s likely not to be at his best.”

“Yeah,” Cassian said. He stretched again, and cracked his knuckles. “This mission would probably work best if I managed not to speak to anyone on that planet at all.”

“You could pretend to be mute,” K2 offered.

“I was thinking more along the lines of long-range assassination,” Cassian said. “It’s a pity, but it was one of the possibilities from the start. If he’s as broken as he probably is from what we know they’ve done by now, it’d only be a kindness anyway.”

“Oh,” K2 said.

  


~~~

  


Cassian had a recent holo of the kid to work from, but holos could be deceptive. The holo showed a clean-cut, square-jawed young man with a shy smile and dark eyes, bearing a vague resemblance to either or both of his parents but nothing striking. A handsome youth, well-built and tall like his father, with commendations for being a good worker, but mediocre grades on his certifications-- high marks for dexterity and planning, but no great shakes as a scholar. Nothing exceptional either way, just a 21 year old cargo loader with a clean record, the identifying marker of a couple of small tattoos on his limbs and body, and nothing else of note.

Interestingly, Organa had said he was married, but that wasn’t in the file. His official records hadn’t been updated with that information, which either meant it was recent and the paperwork hadn’t been filed, or that, perhaps, as a lifelong refugee, he’d deemed it politic to keep his attachments off the record. Or, maybe, that Organa was lying to Cassian, but Cassian wasn’t convinced that Organa would bother with that sort of thing. Surely Organa already knew Cassian’s heart had no strings left to tug at.

What the holo hadn’t shown was that the kid absolutely knew what the Empire was up to. Maybe he’d initially gone to the docks to look for help, but by the time Cassian and K2 landed, he’d already figured out he wasn’t getting out that way, and he’d gone to ground. It took Cassian half a day, with K2’s location tracker constantly updating him, to track the kid down to an abandoned industrial farm on the outskirts of town.

It reeked of “trap”, all over, and Cassian gritted his teeth at the delay and spent an extra two hours just casing the joint, trying to figure out where the Empire had set up. It took him a while, and K2’s extensive scanning of traffic in the area, to figure out that the Empire hadn’t brought the kid out here to lure Cassian out.

“He came here on his own,” K2 concluded.

“They had him for two weeks,” Cassian said. He’d been able to get enough information to know they’d used an interrogation droid on the kid, they absolutely had, and the analysis suggested it had been much more than a brief session. “His mind is fucking _jelly_. What the fuck.”

“Perhaps he had a disaster subroutine hard-coded in,” K2 said.

“Humans don’t do that,” Cassian said. But. It stood to reason. This kid had been born a refugee. He probably did have an instinct for disaster plans.

“He doesn’t have any weapons,” K2 said. “He wouldn’t have a cache waiting here for him, if this wasn’t a planet of his choosing.”

Cassian nodded slowly. He’d come this far with his weapon in a case, but he’d unslung it at the edge of town, and he was openly carrying it now. This was a wilderness, with no restrictions on firearms. “I still don’t know what to expect, though,” he said. “He still could rig something, if he’s smart. Or maybe he _did_ choose to come here, but I can’t begin to think why he would.”

The farm had been both for plants and livestock, and when it had been abandoned, they’d left a lot of equipment behind. Cassian hadn’t spent a lot of time at the Dameron-and-kin’s compound, but he knew it had been a working farm. There’d been all kinds of horrifying smells and such.

Dameron would be right at home here, even if he wasn’t in his right mind. Cassian’s last, nagging, unarticulated thought that they’d planted the tracker on someone to lure him here evaporated at this realization. It was Dameron, all right.

“This is a goddamn nightmare,” Cassian said a little while later. From the motion of his tracking device, Dameron absolutely knew he’d been followed, and had done a rapid circuit of the compound, and now had holed himself up in the far corner of one of the smaller buildings, which had a whole bunch of little rooms. “I would bet you he’s booby trapped every one of those doorways with something fucking heinous.” The truly eerie part was that even with K2’s sensor to pinpoint the kid’s tracker, Cassian hadn’t been able to see or hear him. He was like a ghost. He’d gone within six meters of their hiding spot, in between the refreshes on the sensor’s sweeps for the tracker, and neither of them had seen or heard him.

But there had been a trail of scuffs in the dirt, and one clear bare footprint in a softer patch of mud, to attest to the kid’s passage, right where the tracker had shown he’d been.

“I thought you said he’d been a cargo loader his whole life,” K2 said, as the two of them contemplated the footprint.

One consolation: a plant from the Empire designed to lure Cassian wouldn’t have bare feet.

“Molo didn’t even raise him,” Cassian said. “I don’t know where he fucking learned this.” But he did; Molo had told him, Lita had been a guerrilla with him when they were young, before the Empire. They’d all grown up like this. Of course the kid fucking knew how to improvise a booby trap. He didn’t even have fucking _shoes_ , and he’d made it six kilometers out of town, with minimal doubling-back, and found this place. Either he’d gotten good info from someone, or he had a really good eye for terrain. When barefoot and brain-addled.

“There goes the plan to just assassinate him at a distance, I suppose,” K2 said.

“Stars, would you shut your fucking mouth?” Cassian hissed.

“Technically,” K2 began, and Cassian hissed wordlessly at him again. K2 gestured with his hands as if he were offended.

“I wish that sensor of yours were removable,” Cassian said. “I’d send you back to the ship, with all the help you’ve been.”

They settled in a building with a vantage point across the debris-strewn courtyard, from which they could see the room where the tracker had now been still for half an hour. “I suppose we’ll have to wait him out,” K2 said, as Cassian set up his rifle and investigated the scene through his scope.

Cassian shook his head slightly. “I don’t have time for that,” he said. “We’ve already spent too long on this.”

“He’s surely not in optimal physical condition,” K2 said. “But we can’t leave until he’s confirmed killed, surely.”

“I’m going to try to talk to him,” Cassian said. Dameron might yet be dying or crazy, but it seemed like if he were, he wouldn’t have made it this far.

“What, talk him into surrendering so you can kill him peacefully?” K2 tilted his head.

“No,” Cassian said, disgusted. “Stars! I don’t _have_ to kill him. I was only going to if there was no better option.” He put his eye back to the scope and watched the room where he knew the kid had to be. But there was no movement, and the kid clearly had figured out the angles of view for the windows, and was avoiding them.

Or, had holed up in there and died.

He waited, but the light was failing, and he was not spending all night out here. He mulled over his options, and K2 kept an eye out. If the Empire was watching, they were doing so comfortably, from a distance.

Nobody else was around here either. This was a godforsaken abandoned ruin in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Finally he went over to the window and shouted, “Kes Dameron!”

“That’s your plan,” K2 said from the corridor where he’d been keeping watch. “That’s it? That’s your big plan.”

“Kes Dameron!” Cassian shouted again. He continued in Iberican. “I don’t have fucking time for this!”

That got a response. “Then quit fucking around and come fucking get me,” a hoarse voice shouted back, in a crisp Inner Rim Iberican accent.

“What did he say?” K2 enquired.

“I gotta upgrade your Iberican package to include swears,” Cassian said. He shouted, “I’m not from the Empire, child. Your mother’s friends sent me.”

“Then come and fucking get me,” Dameron shouted back.

“Disable your booby traps and we’ll talk,” Cassian yelled reasonably.

“Leave your gun where I can see it and we’ll talk,” Dameron answered.

Cassian considered that. “You’re not really thinking of doing it,” K2 said, startled.

“What the fuck else am I going to do?” Cassian said.

“If my mother had really sent you,” Dameron said, quieter, not really yelling at all, “she would have given you a codeword, or something, so I would know. She didn’t send you. I don’t care if you leave the gun or what, you’re still going to have to fucking come and get me.”

“Your mother’s friends sent me,” Cassian answered. “Not your mother. I’m not yelling the name of the person who sent me, I can’t verify nobody else is listening.”

“Come in here and talk to me, then,” Dameron said, voice cracking, and Cassian got the distinct impression that he wasn’t yelling anymore because he didn’t have the strength.

Cassian sighed, and slung his gun over his shoulder. “Give a shout if he moves,” he said to K2, “but otherwise stay here, out of sight.”

“Surely he’s seen me,” K2 said.

“I’m sure he has,” Cassian said, “but that doesn’t mean you need to blunder straight into this.”

He went around the long way, to come up alongside the building, but K2 had pointed out exactly which room Dameron was in. Cassian had good climbing equipment, and made quick work of scaling the side of the building. He took the precaution, though, of securing a rope to the window frame of the storey above, and letting himself down to look sidelong through the window, and get a good view of what was inside.

He had to look in two different windows before he finally caught a glimpse of Dameron, who was huddled in the corner with a big metal pipe or something clutched in one hand. He was in shadow, as the dusk fell, and Cassian could only really see him because he was shuddering, intermittently violently, and rocking back and forth slightly as he sat.

From this angle Cassian could also see that the door was jammed shut and had some sort of terrifying agricultural implement braced so that if someone crashed inward through the door, they’d be impaled on a bunch of tines or spikes or little plow-things. He’d be willing to bet all the doors had similar rigs. He’d absolutely been right about this kid.

He poked his head down and glanced through the window a little more fully. No visible booby traps, but. Probably best not to chance it.

“Dameron,” he said. “I left the gun in the other building. Can we talk?”

Dameron flinched, went still, and then turned slowly to look at him, staring at him and tilting his head as if to focus on him with one eye at a time. He started to shake again, and readjusted his grip on the thing he was holding, which on closer inspection was in fact a length of metal pipe.

“They drugged you,” Cassian filled in, after a moment’s consideration. He was getting kind of tired, hanging here. He eased down to put his feet on the windowsill, and crouched there a moment, careful to keep his back turned away so Dameron wouldn’t see that the rifle was slung there.

Dameron moved slightly, to get a better look at him, and the light caught his face more. Cassian almost fell off the windowsill.

Holos could be deceptive, and didn’t always capture a good likeness. The holo in Dameron’s file had completely failed to capture the resemblance he bore Molo. It wasn’t the shape of his face, but something in the way he held himself-- he resembled him disturbingly closely.

“I don’t know how long they had me,” Dameron said. “I don’t-- know-- but they had me-- hooked up to one of those--” He shivered, hard, teeth chattering.

“Interrogation droids,” Cassian filled in. “I know.”

Dameron was shaking hard. It wasn’t just the drugs; he was wearing a shirt with no sleeves, and it was cold here. No shoes either, and his feet were caked with dirt. He was completely inadequately equipped for the climate.

“There’s-- I know-- a tracker,” Dameron said. “They know. You must have the.” His teeth were chattering so hard he couldn’t speak.

“I can help you,” Cassian said, and started to ease into the room.

Dameron picked up the pipe and said, “Don’t,” and Cassian froze, then drew his foot back up and put it on the windowsill. Dameron was half-dead, but he was also bigger than Cassian, his bare arms bulky with muscle, and even a half-dead man could do a lot in desperation.

“I won’t hurt you,” Cassian said. “Organa sent me.”

Dameron shuddered hard, clinging grimly to the length of pipe. “I can’t go home,” he said, gritting his teeth to get the words out. “I know I can’t go home.”

“Why not?” Cassian asked gently.

“Tracker,” Dameron said. “I know they-- let me go-- to see where-- I went or who-- came for me.”

“Yes,” Cassian said. “I figured that too. I was all set to spring you from where they were holding you.”

“Bullshit,” Dameron said. “You’re here to-- kill me.”

He’d heard them talking. Damn it, K2. “Okay, I’ll admit I would’ve killed you rather than leave you in the Empire’s hands,” Cassian said, “but since you’re out, I can take care of that tracker and we can go-- well, not home, not right away, but I can get you somewhere safe.” He actually hadn’t set anything up, but. He wasn’t lying. He could come up with something.

Dameron was staring at him with Molo’s face. The cheekbones were different, the mouth was different, but his eyes and his nose, and the expression on his face, were uncannily familiar. “I don’t-- I know there’s-- nowhere safe,” Dameron said, jaw set in anguish.

“Safer,” Cassian clarified.

Dameron shuddered, hard, to the point that he almost dropped the pipe, but he grabbed onto it with both hands as the tremor eased. “I should let you kill me,” he said, “but I d-don’t-- want to die.” The last part was said nearly inaudibly, almost plaintively.

“They wanted you to lead them back to Organa,” Cassian said.

Dameron shivered again, less violently, and looked up at Cassian. “I didn’t give him up,” he said fiercely. “I didn’t-- they knew I didn’t know anything, so they-- I pretended to break and gave them a pile of lies, but I-- they asked me about Bail Organa and I said no, not him.”

“They took you expressly to get something against him,” Cassian said.

“I know,” Dameron said. He bared his teeth. “I told them-- I was with the Rebellion and-- my home cell was on Garel.”

“I wondered why they picked this pain in the ass planet,” Cassian said. “The one place in this entire galaxy I have no contacts and can’t blend in.”

“The one place-- there’s nobody I give a shit about,” Dameron said, shuddering violently. He laughed, or at least that was Cassian’s best guess as to what that horrible sound was. “Made it seem-- like I-- really didn’t want-- tell ‘em too, cried and screamed-- and I don’t think-- believed me-- but here I am.”

“Nice,” Cassian said, impressed.

“S-said Bail Or-- gana was a-- oblivious--” Dameron’s jaw seemed to lock up, and he shook, clutching the metal pipe in his hands like a talisman.

“Good detail,” Cassian said. “That means they’ll come here to find you, though.”

“I know,” Dameron said. He shuddered again. “I know. You have-- to kill me.”

“Not if we run,” Cassian said.

Dameron laughed hollowly, not raising his head. “No,” he said, “I know you do. And I have-- to let you. I just-- don’t want-- to die.”

“He hasn’t moved,” K2 said suddenly over the comm. Cassian rolled his eyes.

“I know that,” he answered. “I’m fucking looking at him, you ass.”

“I just wanted to check in,” K2 said.

“I came here to-- d-die,” Dameron said. “I know I-- have t-t-to-- I should just-- let you-- but I don’t-- I don’t want--”

“It’s all right,” Cassian said. “K2, just--”

The pipe hit the floor with a clattering thunk, and Cassian looked over in startlement; Dameron had tipped over, and was twitching on the floor. Cassian realized immediately that the man was having a seizure. He scrambled in the window and kicked the pipe away, swept the debris away from the area of floor where Dameron was lying, and then unslung his rifle and whipped off his coat to stick it under the man’s head to keep him from cracking his skull against the concrete floor.

“K2,” he said, “he’s unconscious.”

“Did you do it?” K2 asked.

“No,” Cassian said. He grimaced as Dameron’s body jerked violently, slamming his head into the possibly-inadequate cushion of Cassian’s coat. It might not matter; this might be a fatal collapse. Those droids could cause brain damage, usually did. “The doors are boobytrapped with sharp things, not exploding things. You’re made of metal, you can get in here.”

“If I get damaged you have to lug my carcass out,” K2 groused.

“Fair enough,” Cassian said. “Just-- things will probably fall toward you, so be smart about it when you come through the doors.”

“Fine,” K2 said, resigned.

The seizure ended as quickly as it had started, and Dameron lolled limply against the ground, drooling blood where he’d bitten his tongue. Cassian carefully turned his head to one side so he wouldn’t choke if he vomited, and went to dismantle the trap on this door, at least.

Even if Dameron was dead, now, he wasn’t about to pitch the body out the window. They’d have to go out the door. And that meant getting rid of the damn booby traps.

Dameron made a noise as he came around, and rolled onto his side, completely uncoordinated. So, he wasn’t dead yet, at least. Cassian hadn’t made any real progress on the booby trap yet but he gave it up as a bad job and went back over to Dameron.

“It’s okay, man,” Cassian said, “hold still, friend, you’re okay.” He grabbed his rifle, slung it back over his shoulder, and kicked the metal pipe a little farther away. Not that Dameron was going to be in any shape to grab it, but it was still good to take precautions.

Dameron was trying to sit up. “You gotta stay still, friend,” Cassian said. He took Dameron’s hands in his and held them for a moment, wincing at how cold they were. “Take it easy a minute. Give your body time to catch up. You’re okay.”

Dameron stared at him with wild, unfocused eyes, but subsided. “This is ridiculous,” K2 said suddenly, over the comm. “I’m not coming through all this.”

Cassian gently freed one hand from Dameron’s and hit the button to reply, “It can’t all be fun all the time.”

Dameron made a noise like he was trying to speak, and tried again to push himself up. “Shh,” Cassian said, and pulled him up, holding him upright against his shoulder, curling a hand carefully around the back of his neck. “Hey. Shh.”

Dameron was shivering. Cassian picked his coat up off the floor one-handed, shook it out, and wrapped it around Dameron. The IT-0 droids used drugs as part of their programming, but there wasn’t a lot of information about their effects. Generally speaking, subjects of the in-depth versions of those interrogations did not survive, or if they did, were not in any condition to speak about what had happened.

It wasn’t likely Dameron would regain coherence, but then, it had been incredibly improbable that he’d made it this far, so Cassian supposed it wouldn’t do to write the man off. Still, it was likely he’d used up the rest of whatever strength he had in getting to this point, and this collapse might well prove final.

Dameron’s hand closed in the front of Cassian’s shirt, like he was trying to pull himself up. It might be reflex.

“It’s okay,” Cassian said quietly. “Shh. It’s okay.”

“I’m not coming through the doors,” K2 said over the comm. “I’m coming in the window, and I’ll dismantle the traps on my way out. These are ridiculous.”

Cassian sighed. “Fine,” he said.

Dameron didn’t react, hand wrapped tightly in Cassian’s shirt, breath coming harsh and uneven. He was probably dying. If he was dying anyway, Cassian could take his coat back, but there was something inhumane in that, so Cassian hung onto him as he kept shivering and trying to breathe.

“I knew your father,” Cassian said quietly. “He saved my life a couple of times.” Dameron shivered, and his grip on Cassian’s shirt front flexed spasmodically. “I was there when he died. He mentioned you. I don’t know if you remember, but I came to tell your mother he was dead.”

Dameron definitely reacted to that, his whole body twitching, but speech was clearly beyond him. Still, it was too perfectly-timed to be coincidence. His mind wasn’t completely gone, yet. “Do you remember me, then?” Cassian asked. “I wasn’t using this name. I don’t remember what I said my name was. You were smallish, maybe a young teenager?”

Dameron made another purposeful movement, maybe an unsteady nod, or maybe a denial. He tried to speak.

“Shh,” Cassian said. “Shh. Don’t-- it’s all right.” He smoothed his hand down Dameron’s back, under the loose covering of the padded coat. “He was a friend. He taught me a lot. I think that’s why Bail Organa chose to send me after you.”

“Don’t want to die,” Dameron whispered, slurring.

“Shh, I know,” Cassian said. “I know.”

K2’s head poked through the window abruptly. “He’s bigger than I thought,” he said. Dameron flinched.

“K-2SO is reprogrammed,” Cassian said. “He works for me.”

Dameron clutched at Cassian’s shirt front. “Tracker,” he said, “ankle cuff.”

“We leave it here,” Cassian said, “they’ll have to come through the booby traps to find it.”

Dameron nodded. He was leaking blood from his mouth and shivering, but he managed an expression that was a ghastly approximation of a grin. He looked more like Molo in that moment than Cassian could easily handle.

“That sounds great,” K2 said. He climbed the rest of the way in, for some reason. Well, it would be good to bring his scanner to bear and make sure the tracker really was around Dameron’s ankle, and that there wasn’t a second one hidden somewhere else. It wouldn’t do to remove the wrong bit of hardware.

Dameron tried to say something. “Shh,” Cassian said, soothingly. “It’s all right.”

“Oh,” K2 said, peering closer at both of them. “Oh, this _is_ a sentimental attachment.”

“No, K2,” Cassian said patiently, “this is a thing sentients do, when one is injured, and the other one is gentle with them, because they’re injured. Now make with the scanning, I need to make sure we get the tracking device.”

  


~~~~

  


Dameron lost consciousness again pretty early on in the proceedings. Cassian had managed to get about 100 calories’ worth of high-sugar emergency rations into him, but wasn’t convinced he’d actually swallowed any of it. It was the middle of the night by the time they made it back to the ship, what with all the doubling-back, and K2 bitching the entire time about carrying Dameron’s dead weight, like he was enough to be significant given K2’s significant load capacity.

Cassian was pretty sure they were going to all this effort for a vegetable or a corpse, but there was no point leaving him. The tracker had indeed been welded into a cuff around his ankle. He’d initially had it sewn into his waistband, put there by someone in the Rebellion, he wasn’t coherent enough to explain. The Empire had found it, and had attached it so he had no hope of removing it. The metal band had left marks that would probably scar, but K-2SO had a cutting attachment that had taken only a bit of finagling to bring to bear without cutting Dameron’s flesh. So after a few minutes of work, sped up by Dameron’s unsettling limp unconsciousness, they’d left the tracker in that room, and there was no point leaving a corpse for the Empire to find and perhaps derive some analysis from.

(To add some mystery to the proceedings, K2 had pried the tracker out of the bracelet, and had left it in the room and brought the broken band out with them and hurled it into the underbrush. That way they wouldn’t know what kind of tool had freed Dameron.)

But Dameron still had a pulse when K2 put him down on the floor of the ship, more gently than Cassian had anticipated. Cassian got the medkit out and held the scanner over Dameron, confirming that he still had cardiac and lung function, and there was some activity in his brain.

The scanner confirmed that the tracker they’d removed had really been the only one, which was what Cassian had really been looking for. But if there was still brain activity, then whatever damage he’d sustained hadn’t permanently shut him down yet, so it was worth trying to save him.

 

Cassian sent an encrypted message out, routing it through a temporary outpost on a nearby mining planet, and sending half the packets one route and the others a separate one, with the end destination the base at Yavin IV. It was a brief message, but he squeezed in a low-quality holo of Dameron’s face as verification. Dameron looked dead in the holo but there was no help for it; he didn’t specify the man’s condition beyond “alive”. There wasn’t room to get into it, and it was too soon to tell anyway.

They set a course for the nearest big spaceport with a lot of traffic to get lost in. It would be hard to tell if they were followed there, but it would also be hard for anyone following them to keep tabs on them.

 

The med scanner had him put two packets of fluids into Dameron, and loads of antibiotics, as his hands and feet were covered in scrapes and cuts. Cassian mostly sat with K2 up front, but he came back to check on the kid now and then. In repose, in the low light of the ship’s passenger space, the resemblance to Molo wasn’t as strong.

They came in range of the message relay of the big spaceport, and Cassian took advantage to bounce another message around to get to the Yavin base, confirming that Dameron had survived the extraction. K2 took care of hailing the spaceport’s traffic control, and Cassian went back to make sure Dameron was secured for re-entry.

No sign of consciousness, and Cassian was resigned to a less optimistic phrasing in the more detailed report he was going to send once they were landed. Likely, Dameron had overdone it on his escape, and wouldn’t regain consciousness again. Too bad. Cassian buckled the strap across Dameron’s chest so he wouldn’t fall out of the bunk if the landing was rough.

As he drew his arm back, Dameron’s hand shot up and closed around his forearm. Cassian let out a startled yelp.

“What,” K2 asked, alarmed.

“Who the fuck are you,” Dameron slurred, eyes wild and unfocused.

“Hey,” Cassian said, “hey, it’s okay, it’s just-- Bail Organa sent me!”

Dameron tried, with zero success, to focus on him. “I don’t know Bail Organa,” he said indistinctly, in Basic. “Corrupt old fucker never gave a shit about my people, I don’t know him.” But he blinked, and frowned, letting go of Cassian’s arm.

“I’m not interrogating you,” Cassian said gently. He had a strange feeling, behind his ribs: Dameron was still trying to lie, to protect what little he knew of the Rebellion. “It’s all right. Kes, I knew your father. I know your mother, and Norasol.” That was the clever witch’s name. “Bail sent me, for Lita’s sake.”

Dameron subsided, squeezing his eyes shut. Cassian was willing to bet he had a wicked headache. “Andor,” Dameron said finally, which answered the question as to what name Cassian had used. Huh, he didn’t remember doing that.

“Yes,” Cassian said. He put his hand gently against Dameron’s chest. “We’re coming in to land at Lothal, stay still. I can get you medical care there. Does your head hurt?”

“Some,” Dameron said.

“I can give you a painkiller,” Cassian said.

“No,” Dameron said, managing to pry his eyes open in alarm. “No drugs.”

“Okay,” Cassian said. “Suit yourself. I have to go help K2 land.”

  


When the return message came through the relay, of all places, it was from Alderaan, and of all the people to have sent it, it was Leia Organa herself. “I need as much information on his condition as you can give me,” she said, and Cassian figured she was in charge of figuring out how much dirt Dameron had spilled. So he put together his report, mentioning that even in delirium Dameron was still denying Bail Organa with every breath, and attached another holo, managing to get one this time where Kes was visibly alive.

Cassian had managed to get them to a med droid that was off the Imperial network, one of the ones the Rebellion had stashed around. It had evaluated Dameron without waking him, and had helped rebalancing the man’s electrolytes and such, but hadn’t had much advice about Dameron’s mental state. Which was just as well; Cassian had sympathetically noted that Dameron wasn’t likely to be sanguine about a droid hovering over him administering injections.

Dameron had been intermittently conscious all afternoon, and had asked a few desultory questions about their whereabouts and status, but had fallen asleep each time before hearing any answers. Now he was semi-awake, so it was as good a time as any to get a little holo clip to send. “Say hi to the holocam,” Cassian said, coming into the room and switching on a light.

Dameron blinked, sitting up on his elbow and squinting. “Who are you sending this to?” he asked warily, giving the holocam rig a skeptical once-over.

Perfect. Cassian shut the holocorder off. It showed that he was awake, coherent, and cognizant. He went to his comm suite and embedded the file into the report, and sent it. “I sent my last report to the Rebellion’s headquarters,” Cassian said, “but the response I got back was from Leia Organa, so I guess she’s in charge now.”

Dameron blinked again. “I asked what day it was,” he said, “but.”

“You fell asleep again,” Cassian said. “You haven’t managed to get answers to any of your questions because you can’t stay awake long enough. Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t go home,” Dameron said. “You can’t-- you can’t take me anywhere--” This was about the only thing he’d been coherent enough to say, earlier.

“Shh,” Cassian said, putting the holocorder away. He came and sat on the edge of the bed, putting a soothing hand on Dameron’s shoulder. “I know. I’m getting you out to a safe place. We can worry about the rest later.”

“When they took me,” Dameron said, “they took-- I was at-- with my family. I don’t think-- I didn’t hear any blaster fire but I don’t know if they burned-- I don’t know if they hurt anyone--”

“Shh,” Cassian said, mulling that over. He didn’t know if Bail would have mentioned that. “It’s all right. I don’t think they took anyone else. I’ll find out if anyone got hurt. I don’t think so, though, Dameron.”

“How long has it been?” Dameron asked. “I don’t know-- Shara was due in three weeks, the baby, has it been that long?”

Cassian had sort of assumed Bail was lying or exaggerating about the wife and kid. “Organa mentioned a wife but she’s not in your file,” he said, more honest than he probably should be. “I don’t know for sure how long they had you, but I was tapped for the mission about a week ago.”

“So you don’t know,” Dameron said. “You don’t know if she survived or if the baby’s been born yet or if they had to run or if they went to Alderaan or--”

“Shh,” Cassian said, since Dameron was getting agitated again. “I’ll find out.”

“If they didn’t tell you, is that a good sign or a bad sign?” Dameron asked, clearly trying to calm himself. That was progress, that was more lucidity than he’d shown heretofore.

“It’s meaningless,” Cassian said. “They only gave me information I’d need for the mission. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to tell me any more. What if I failed? The less I know, the less I can tell the Empire.”

It was a comforting, trite reassurance with no basis in reality, but it sounded good, and did the trick. Of course Cassian wouldn’t be caught by the Empire, he had a lullaby pill in his sleeve at all times. He’d been the level of operative that was expected to commit suicide upon risk of capture for many years now.

He was thinking now, though, that if Dameron were really as coherent as he seemed to be, he might be a good resource. It was extremely rare to extract someone who’d spent that long at the tender mercy of the IT-0 droids and their operators and have them able to make any sense at all. Dameron might have valuable intel.

Dameron was staring bleakly at the ceiling. “I guess it doesn’t matter if the baby’s born yet or not,” he said. “It’s not like I’ll ever see any of them again.”

“Why not?” Cassian asked. “We got the tracker off you. We should be careful for a little while, but if you want to rejoin your family once we’re sure they’re not looking for you anymore, I’m sure you can.”

Dameron slowly rolled his eyes over to look at Cassian. “Didn’t you say you knew my father?” he said, eyes narrowed in apparent calculation.

“I can’t believe you remember me saying that,” Cassian said, genuinely startled.

“Were you lying?” Dameron asked.

Cassian shook his head. “No,” he said. “I worked with him for years. He saved my life a bunch of times and taught me a lot of what I know.”

Dameron was staring at him, and after a slow, contemplative blink, he said, “I remember you.”

Cassian nodded. “It wasn’t that long ago,” he said. Kes had still been a child, but it hadn’t been very many years ago. The boy had seemed utterly unmoved by the news of his father’s death, silent and wide-eyed and judgmental. Cassian hadn’t spoken to him directly, he’d just talked to the women. Lita and Norasol.

“Then why are you lying to me now?” Dameron asked. “It’s just insulting. Did you respect my father?”

“I did,” Cassian said, stung out of his reverie.

“Then don’t lie to his son,” Dameron said. “They lied to me for years about where he was and why, and only told me when I was nearly grown what he’d really been doing my whole life. I’m not a child anymore. I know I can’t go home. Don’t lie to me now.”

“I’m not lying,” Cassian said. “We can get you new papers and a fresh start somewhere.”

Dameron was shaking his head before he’d even finished. “No,” he said. “No, there’s nowhere safe.” He looked even more like Molo now, unhappy and tired-looking, the corners of his mouth dragged down and making his young face look older. “I don’t think so, but Lita made this choice for me, and now I get to follow Molo’s example.”

Cassian weighed his choices. Try again with consoling platitudes, or go in for the kill?

He’d had a long week. He went in for the kill. “Well,” he said. “I’m not bullshitting you, we can still get you out, but if you want to join the Rebellion we could really use you.”

Dameron stared up at him, expression unreadable. “I’m sure you could,” he said. Cassian gathered himself to take that as a refusal, but Dameron’s mouth pulled to one side a little, and he continued, “Count me in.”


	2. Chapter 2

 

The comm was a fuzzy recording, and cut off quickly. It had been embedded within a more prosaic communique to Andor, but K2 had snipped the excerpt and passed it on to Kes, on a small chip player, so he could watch it close up. Shara’s face swam into resolution in the fuzzy holo, forehead pinching in distress. “No baby yet,” she said, “but we’re okay. Is he-- will he get this?” And it cut off.

Kes watched it several dozen times, envisioning himself reaching through the holo static and touching her. Eventually Andor came and leaned in the doorway.

Andor was much as Kes remembered him, though shrunk a bit by Kes’s own interim growth. He’d loomed large in Kes’s imagination in the intervening years, the only member of the Rebellion Kes had ever really known as such-- but he was really a slight man, lean and sharp, worn and wary. Kes’s memory of him as a sharp-faced, grim figure was tempered now by recognition: that was sorrow, not cruelty, lining his mouth, and his Iberican was identifiably Fest-accented, with all the tragedy that suggested that Kes, at 14, could not have read for himself, would not have known.

They’d been-- somewhere, for several days. Everything was still kind of blurry, to Kes, but he’d been able to stay conscious and alert for longer and longer stretches, and had managed to piece together, painstakingly, a kind of mental narrative of where he was in the universe, how long he’d been out of it, what was going on, who he was. He spent less and less time confused and drifting, and more often was able to be sure that he was real, that this was real, that it wasn’t hallucinations still.

He wasn’t up to going outside or interacting with anyone beyond Andor and K2, but he got the feeling that wasn’t really an option anyway. His current world was this small, dingy room, on an unidentified planet, and the time Andor spent with him going over what had happened in his captivity and trying to collate the logs stolen from the Empire’s computers with the actual sessions Kes had endured. They’d managed to piece together a lot of how those droids seemed to work, and Kes’s memories were surprisingly coherent, given what a nightmare they’d been at the time.

He still sometimes got confused, and thought he was back there, with the droid’s implacable menace, full of chemicals and stimulating random neurons so he hallucinated, and at any moment he’d be prompted with a jolt of pure agony and a mechanical question. But he spent less and less of his time mentally braced for it.

Sleep was going to be an ongoing problem, he could tell, but at least he’d been getting enough of it that he was recovering his functions as a human. He’d take that as it came.

“You can send a message back,” Andor said. “But if you want to record something it can’t be much longer than that clip. There’s a little more wiggle room if you want to write something.”

Kes considered that, and pressed the button to play the clip of Shara again. “No baby yet,” she said, “but we’re okay.” There wasn’t much data, it was badly degraded by compression, encryption, decryption, but he could see the curl of hair that had escaped her clip and dangled next to her face, could see that she wasn’t wearing any makeup, could see the collar of her shirt, which he recognized as one Norasol had loaned her-- meaning, of course, that she still couldn’t wear her own clothing, which meant of course, no baby, as she’d said. He couldn’t tell if she had earrings on. He couldn’t stop staring. He’d hallucinated her so much, under those drugs, with the droid, and all the hallucinations had been slightly wrong, a nightmare--

“We don’t have the clearance or resources to even try to set up a direct comm link,” Andor said. “So that’s not really an option, but.”

Kes shook his head slightly. “I don’t have much to say,” he said. “I could yell at my mother but that’s never worked out for me in my life. She knows what she did. It wouldn’t do any good.”

Andor nodded absently, then quirked his eyebrows. “I do remember her as remarkably strong-willed,” he said.

Kes managed to peel his eyes away from the motionless, blurry frame of Shara, to look at Andor. He hadn’t yet really thought of this, distracted as he’d been, but the crushing headache was finally fading and he was as alert as he’d been in days, and he blinked at Andor. “You--” he said, and hesitated, trying to think of how to phrase it.

Andor looked alarmed, then resigned.

“Knew my father,” Kes finished, recognizing that Andor knew what he was going to ask. Clearly, the other man had been inwardly preparing himself for it this whole time.

“He told me about you,” Andor said, looking down toward his feet, shoulders slumping a little as he leaned in the doorway. “That he had a son. That part of the deal was that you wouldn’t know him. It weighed on him, a lot. He thought about you a lot.”

Kes nodded slightly, still trying to collect himself to ask the question he had to, that Andor’s every microexpression was begging him not to. “My--” He paused, and shook his head a little. “Did you kill him?”

Perfect astonishment passed across Andor’s face, then understanding, then a touch of -- guilt, maybe?-- and he let his breath out, shaking his head slightly. Clearly, he’d actually been expecting something else. “No,” he said. Then his expression shifted again, a fleeting hint of chagrin. “Not that I have proof, or anything. If it’s easier on you to believe I did, I’ll say yes.”

“No,” Kes said, “it’s not-- my auntie said you probably did, and mother agreed, and I wasn’t supposed to be listening, but I’ve thought about that a lot.” They’d seemed so matter-of-fact about it, and Kes had long mulled over what it would take to kill a friend, as Andor had claimed to be to Molo.

“It’s not unreasonable,” Andor said. “I’m expected to kill myself if captured. I would have killed him to spare him if I had the chance.”

“But you didn’t,” Kes concluded. That flash of guilt on Andor’s face had certainly not been from lying.

“No,” Andor said. He grimaced. “I should have lied. I underestimated you again.”

“So he died-- in their hands,” Kes said.

Andor nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “I wish I had been able to give him that. He gave me so much, over the years. He was a good man, Dameron, I don’t know if you know that-- but he really was.”

It hit Kes like a sledgehammer to the chest, then, suddenly, what Andor had probably been expecting him to comment on earlier, and he had to breathe through the pain of it. “Oh,” he said. “My-- oh.” And Andor knew what he meant, his face settling deeper into sorrow. “That’s not what I wanted for my son,” Kes managed to say. “I wanted-- to know him.”

“I’m sorry,” Andor said.

Kes stared bleakly, unseeing, at his hands. Shara had known him maybe a year. Would she tell his son that he had been a good man? Would she think that, really, once life came at her with whatever it had in store for her now, now that he’d abandoned her?

It wasn’t that he’d never seen his father at all, but most of the times he’d seen him, he hadn’t really known who he was. Lita had told him, but it wasn’t until he was twelve, the traditional age when children were given more responsibilities, that she’d explained that Molo wasn’t actually the deadbeat everyone pretended he was.

Kes closed his eyes for a moment, imagining himself slinking into the back of a family gathering four or five years from now, his own son regarding him without recognition, the various cousins who couldn’t be clued in giving him the cold shoulder at what an irresponsible father he was being. He remembered people treating Molo like that, and he remembered regarding the man with suspicion, refusing to sit on his lap.

Andor sat down next to him, and put a hand on his back. “You can still change your mind,” he said softly. “And circumstances may change. You don’t have to give your life to this.”

Kes managed to get a breath, and said, “I can’t risk it.”

“It might be all right,” Andor said.

Kes looked up at Andor. “Would you risk it?” he asked. “If it was your family, is that a chance you’d take? That if you just-- moved, and got false papers, and pretended not to know any of your old friends, maybe the Empire wouldn’t find you and kill you and your family?”

Andor’s face was set with a terrible sorrow. “That’s a choice that was never mine to make,” he said. “My family is dead, long ago.”

Kes thought briefly about flying into a violent rage, his body too small to contain this feeling he couldn’t quite categorize. But instead he just shuddered and folded in on himself.

“I can’t sit here,” he said. “Give me something to do.”

  


~~~~

 

“Whose baby have you stolen now, Mama?” Leia asked, her lovely mouth curving as she pretended not to be charmed by the infant in Breha’s arms. Breha tilted her body a little so Leia could see the infant. “Oh, this one’s brand-new!”

“He’s less than a day old,” Breha said, and gave Leia a narrow-eyed look. “Wash your hands before you come any closer.”

“I just came through a decontam,” Leia said. “No, it’s all right, I won’t ask to hold him. He’s so little!”

“Full-term,” Breha said, “and healthy. This is Kes Dameron’s son.”

Leia’s face pinched in sorrow, then went soft, and she glanced up at Breha before looking back down at the child, who was peacefully asleep. He really was an attractive infant, less unnerving than most newborns-- he had a faint but even coating of dark hair on his head, and his cheeks were already round. “You saw the latest from Aach,” she said. “Kes is lucid. We didn’t figure he’d be in such good shape.”

“It’s very hopeful,” Breha agreed. She had indeed seen the holo in question, and it had been heartbreaking, not just for its content but also its context. She’d seen it with Lita Dameron, who she respected very much, sitting in a collapsed heap next to her, still recovering from her injuries, and it had been so painful to look at the face of someone she’d known from birth and see him so clearly in pain. It had been a bare second of footage, a battered and tired-looking Kes glancing up into the holocam and looking suspicious, but he was undeniably himself, and Andor’s report confirmed it.

“There might be a follow-up,” Leia said. “I haven’t gone through the latest batch yet.” They’d sent a reply, almost right away, and Leia had dutifully prioritized it. She smiled, softly. “I just got in, I haven’t had a moment.” They’d put together another message to announce the baby’s birth but hadn’t taken a holo yet, waiting for the next outgoing batch of encrypted messages.

“I trust your ability to organize your own workload,” Breha said, amused. The infant in her arms sighed and wriggled, and Leia went a bit misty-eyed watching him. Breha crooned and rocked him. There was just something so unutterably sweet about newborns, how small their worlds were, how small they could pull you down to be-- your whole world, shrunk down just to the sphere of theirs. Baby Bey, not yet named, birth not yet officially registered, squirmed and made little smacking motions with his mouth for a moment, then sighed again and slid heavily back into sleep.

“He’s so perfect,” Leia said wonderingly, and Breha could tell she badly wanted to hold him. Too bad, decontam or not Breha wasn’t letting someone who traveled that much anywhere near an infant this new.

“He really is,” Breha said.

“How’s the mother?” Leia asked, glancing up with a grimace.

Breha smiled sadly. “Well,” she said. “The grandmother’s still in rough physical shape.” Lita Dameron had nearly died of internal injuries; already a frail woman from an injury sustained as a youth, never properly healed, she had suffered severe internal bleeding after the beating the Imperial soldiers had given her prior to arresting her son. “The mother is-- well, physically, anyway,  she’s fine: the birth went smoothly and she should be physically recovered without much trouble.”

“But she’s probably pretty upset,” Leia filled in. She’d only briefly met the young woman, who had been quite distracted and probably hadn’t particularly noticed Leia at the time.

“Understandably,” Breha said.

Leia nodded sympathetically, and grimaced, and Breha tilted her head, knowing that her daughter was about to bring up something she wasn’t sure Breha would approve of. Leia clocked her reaction, and gave a resigned little laugh. “I looked her up,” she said. “Shara Bey.” She bit her lower lip. “She-- her qualifications are stellar, and we have such a severe lack of pilots certified on such a wide range of equipment--”

“Now is _hardly_ the time,” Breha said sternly, dismayed. “I don’t think this family needs your help getting further broken up.”

Leia nodded. “I know, but. I mean. You think Kes is going to just waltz back here? Are you offering open sanctuary to Imperial targets, now?”

“No,” Breha said, but honestly she hadn’t spared much thought beyond Kes being alive, Lita’s survival, and the baby being born, to what the family’s actual future would be.

“Lita’s safe enough,” Leia said, “because of her physical condition. It’s not likely the Empire would send anyone after her until her condition stabilizes. But I assume she’s going to quietly disappear sometime before that; surely, Celly’s on the case to find them somewhere to be safe. You think the rest of the family will be safe?” And she looked at the sleeping infant. Breha did too, considering the tiny squeezed-shut eyes, and the swaddled little form.

It squeezed painfully in her chest, to consider this tiny creature’s possible fate, and how stacked against him the deck already was.

She looked up at Leia, thinking of how she’d felt the same way to see her for the first time. In this dim light, Leia looked so much like Padmé Naberrie that it physically hurt.

“I was a refugee, wasn’t I,” Leia said. They’d told her that no one knew who her parents had been, but Leia seemed to know things she shouldn’t. She shook her head slightly. “Just like this.”

It was on the tip of Breha’s tongue to tell her, but she’d promised Bail she wouldn’t, not without him present. “Child,” Breha said.

“Kes wouldn’t put them in danger,” Leia said. “He won’t come back here.”

“I’ll offer him the choice,” Breha said. “It might be safe. You don’t know. If he comes back here he can reunite with his mother as well, and surely they’ll be safe long enough to decide what to do.”

“I’ll see if there’s anything in the incoming messages,” Leia said, “but I’m sure Aach was going to take him to the base at Yavin to recuperate. I know Kes, he’s not going to rush back here, no matter the temptation.”

“They released him,” Breha said. “There’s no reason he can’t return to the planet of his birth.”

“Mama,” Leia said. “It’s a trap. I’m sure he knows that. It’s massively unfair, but it’s a trap. If he comes back here they’ll use that to force the issue of testing our loyalty to the Empire. You know those animals would think it a bonus to tear a family apart over it, just to watch Papa have to swallow his anger. They’ve delighted in tormenting him for years, why should they stop now?”

Breha shook her head. “There’s more to it than that, child,” she said, but she knew Leia knew as much about it as she did. Leia had been a Senator for nearly a year now; there wasn’t much she didn’t know about.

Except herself.

“Of course there is,” Leia said. “But that’s part of it, for certain. So this is the choice the Damerons face-- stay here and never see Kes again, but raise this child in peace and safety,” and she counted on her fingers, “or, take their chances with him coming here and hope the Empire decides not to carry out the plan they’ve clearly been following this whole time, to link Papa to the Rebellion through an accused dissident,” and she ticked off another option on her fingers, “ _or,_ go somewhere they can be with Kes. And if they choose that third option, you still think it would be immoral of me to approach Bey and try to recruit her for the skills she has that we need? I’m not even talking active service, we could use her as an instructor!”

“I think maybe we need to take this one thing at a time,” Breha said.

“I am absolutely certain that Aach is going to give Kes the hard sell,” Leia said. “You know what a formidable woodsman Kes is; Aach mentioned having difficulty tracking him down, and it takes a lot to impress him.”

“I remember all the trouble Kes got you into,” Breha said, smiling at the memory of it. An eventual willing collaborator to Leia’s horror of formal occasions, Kes had once taken her orienteering through an ornamental park, and the pair had easily evaded her bodyguards for three hours. Breha shook her head, and schooled her features back into neutrality. “Sweetheart, I know you believe that everyone should join the Rebellion, but I think you need to leave this family alone for the time being.”

Leia laughed softly. “Mama,” she said, “of course I’m not going to go prod a woman awake hours after she gives birth and hassle her to come fight a war for me. I know you raised me ruthless but I’m not that ruthless. I’m just saying, when war comes, and it’s going to, I’d like to have more pilots than I do, and the Pathfinders sure could use someone like Kes.”

“I still hold out hope it won’t come to war,” Breha said, gazing down at the infant in her arms. He had been moving, a little, and sure enough, his eyes opened in the dim light. He wriggled, and blinked solemnly at her, curling one tiny fist that had come untucked from the swaddlings. She put her finger into the circle of his hand and he gripped it tightly, snuffling and squeaking a little, then subsided, holding onto her finger.

Leia moved closer, bending to look at the infant’s face. “What a precious little thing,” she whispered.

“He looks like his father did,” Breha said. “I held him at this age too.” It had been just before she’d received her final diagnosis, before she’d known for sure she’d never have her own biological children, so it had been exceptionally bittersweet. She’d known Lita already, had been the one to advise her to come give birth on Alderaan. And Kes had looked so heartbreakingly much like a biological child of her and Bail might have looked, it had been a terrible ache to hold him. Still sometimes to this day Breha could remember the pain under her ribs, looking at Kes as he’d grown, and now that he was a man. His nose was all wrong, and surely her child would have had eyes more like hers, but as a child he had borne Bail a slight resemblance, enough to be painful.

Breha had never mentioned this to anyone, but it came back to her now, looking down at this baby. Leia’s adoption, and later Winter’s, had soothed the ache of it a little, but she’d never forget it.

“Really,” Leia said. She started to reach out toward the child’s hand, but at Breha’s stern look, put her hand back behind her back. “But I was older than this when you met me.”

“You were smaller,” Breha said. Her arms would never forget how tiny Leia had been. “But yes, you were several days old when I met you.”

“Smaller than this,” Leia said, surprised. “But he’s so tiny!”

“He’s average sized,” Breha said. “I know, I know. You were small, Leilila.” She had too much practice to let slip that twins were often born small, and did not let herself slide into her usual worried reverie about what had happened to Padmé Naberrie’s son. If he were half as beautiful and brilliant as her daughter… but there was no time for that now. Only Bail knew, and he had promised to keep tabs on the boy.

“Still am,” Leia said, a bit regretfully.

Breha smiled at her. In her arms, the infant mewled again, and then let out a bleating little cry. “Oh,” she said, seeing how he was moving his mouth, “I think it’s about time for him to be waking up hungry. I’d better take him to his mother.”

Leia stepped back, turning toward the door, and then gestured in startlement, pressing her hand to her chest. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Shara Bey was leaning in the doorway, improbably polished-looking for having given birth twelve hours beforehand. She was in a long, loose dress and no shoes, but her hair was brushed and neatly tied back, and she had lipgloss on, and looked ready for anything. If there were anyone who could match Lita Dameron for strength of will it would be this woman, Breha thought. It struck her to be a little in awe of what the child in her arms might amount to, someday.

“Hi,” Shara said. “I was just sort of wondering where my baby got to, but I see he’s in good hands.” Breha caught the look she gave Leia, though; she’d surely heard most of their conversation.

“You’ve been in that doorway a while,” Breha commented mildly, getting to her feet. The baby grumbled, then bleated again, following it up with a real wail, and Shara made a face that could either have been chagrin at having been caught, or more likely, discomfort at what must be the somewhat novel sensation of her milk letting down.

“A bit,” Shara said. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but I figured if you were talking about me it was just as well.” She held her arms out, and Breha hesitated.

“I know he doesn’t weigh much,” Breha said, “but you should probably--”

“I gave birth, I didn’t get shot,” Shara said, composed and keen-edged. “I can hold my baby.” Breha weighed her options for a moment, but then decided not to press her luck; she recognized the sharpness of maternal instinct in Shara’s voice. So she handed the child over, who wailed at the transfer but then instantly calmed, and curled into his mother’s chest with a decreasing little set of snuffles.

Shara’s entire aspect softened as she folded herself around the baby. She was a lovely young woman, truly, and had held up admirably under the stress of the last couple of weeks. It wasn’t hard to see why Kes would have admired her. Not that Breha had any particular insight into Kes’s mind; she hadn’t seen him in several years, not since he was old enough to take on paid work to support his family. He’d had time to tag along on diplomatic missions before then, but since then he’d been perpetually absent. Breha still thought of him as a wide-eyed little boy more easily than the long-legged, strong-jawed creature she knew he’d ended up.

“There’s a new batch of encrypted messages,” Leia said, when no one had spoken in a few moments. “I handed them off to my sister Winter, and she’s sorting and decrypting them. I expect an update from Kes, or about him at least. I’ll go help her, and as soon as we finished sorting them I’ll bring you whatever’s there that’s relevant to you.”

Shara looked up from the baby. “I’d like that,” she said. “Thanks.”

 

~~~~~

 

Shara didn’t wait for Leia to come to her. She nursed the baby back to sleep and left him with her father, then found a pair of slippers and a more substantial bathrobe and set out to bully someone into showing her the way to Winter’s office. She knew Winter better than she knew Leia, but that wasn’t saying much.

Everyone seemed to think she should be resting, and she was dimly aware that her body was not exactly thrilled at being called upon to perform more tasks-- her organs were still rearranging themselves, abruptly freed from months of compression, which was exceedingly uncomfortable-- but the med droid had said she hadn’t sustained any particular damage in the delivery, and so there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t move about as she pleased, if she felt up to it.

Maybe she was expected to lie around and mope while other people decided her family’s fate, but she certainly wasn’t going to.

A startled member of the household staff obediently led her down a hallway to a suite of rooms, and fussed at her until she sat down on an overstuffed sofa in what was clearly an informal sitting room. An older woman came out, and regarded her in some surprise.

“Yes,” the woman said, as the staff member murmured something inaudible to her, “yes, my niece is here.” She looked at Shara. “What are you doing up and about?” she asked.

“Senator Organa said she might have a communication from my husband,” Shara said. Now that she was sitting down, she was feeling a little unsteady. Walking all this way might have been asking a bit much of her body, which had been a faithful servant and probably deserved a little more consideration than she was presently giving it. It wasn’t… pain, precisely, that she was feeling, but it was a lot of aftereffects of overexertion, and deep exhaustion, and she just wasn’t sure her legs would obey her any more.

“Surely she would bring it to you, when she had decrypted it,” the woman said. “Let me get you something to drink, you look peaked.”

“I’m all right,” Shara said. She wasn’t really, she was going to have trouble getting up again. It wasn’t important. She could wait here.

“I’m Rouge,” the woman said. “Queen Organa’s sister-in-law.” She went into the corner and switched on a kettle to make tea. The Alderaanians were mad for tea. Shara had no taste for it, but should probably drink something, so it didn’t matter.

“You seem to know who I am,” Shara said. It was possible she’d met this woman. She didn’t remember.

Rouge smiled. She was probably about fifty, impeccably turned-out, with a handsome face, a strong jaw and high cheekbones and endless, keen dark eyes. Her hair was night-black, with clearly-natural streaks of silver, and was caught up in an elaborate style. She was imposing, and it wasn’t hard to see she must be related to the intimidating Bail Organa, who Shara only had the briefest of impressions of due to her state of extreme distraction the entire time she’d been here. “I do,” she said, smiling. “My brother spoke much of you and your ordeal.” She brought over a glass of water and set it on the little ornamental table near Shara’s chair. “Here, let me go and ask my niece how her work progresses. The encoded messages do frequently take her a great deal of time to unravel and piece back together.”

“I assume they’re sent piecemeal,” Shara said.

Rouge gave her a keen look, assessing. “Yes,” she said, and went over to one of the other doors of the suite.

She disappeared through it, and Shara heard her dimly at another door, speaking. She drank from the glass of water, sparingly, not wanting to introduce too much liquid into her system. Nothing was damaged, per se, but she didn’t really fancy utilizing the facilities more than she had to; things were awfully sore, and she just didn’t want to think about it.

(The med droid had said nothing was damaged. Shara wasn’t going to investigate.)

“-- half-dead,” Rouge was saying softly. “The poor thing.”

Shara decided against reacting to that. She had been so upset for so long that almost everything had taken on a kind of crystalline edge, fine-honed and sharp; it meant she had no patience for niceties or manners or simple basic decency. But she also had no time to take offense to anything or care what anyone thought about her. She didn’t even have the capacity to love her child; so far, the thing filled her with this immense feeling of something like hunger, a ferocious sensation that she would destroy anything that threatened this little creature, would do anything to keep it safe. She hadn’t even been able to consider what to name the infant; it was beyond her capacity, to think that clearly on that topic.

“Shara,” Winter said, coming out into the main room. “Oh my stars. Shouldn’t you be in bed?” She looked frazzled and tired, her silver braids fraying. “I haven’t finished decrypting the whole message packet, Leia had to go on another errand, but there _is_ a holo from Kes, I just need a few more minutes to get it put together for you. I think there might be a written message as well but I just haven’t finished sorting it yet.”

“I didn’t come to rush you,” Shara said. Maybe she was being rude. Maybe she shouldn’t be rude. She had no reserves, deep down inside herself, in the place where she gave a fuck about things like that. “I just--”

“Rest, rest,” Winter said, “my goodness, rest, I’ll have it done in just a moment.”

“I’ve put the kettle on,” Rouge said. “I’ll see to her.” She laid a hand on Winter’s arm. “Go, finish.”

“I will,” Winter said.

Rouge went and poured the water into the pot, doing some elaborate thing that Shara had halfway paid attention to on the innumerable other occasions people had prepared tea here. Tea here tasted kind of like dirt, but not unpleasantly so. Her body was heavy, now, sinking into the firmly-padded chair. Distantly, she hoped she wasn’t bleeding through her pad. She’d changed it before setting out here, but the entire situation was one she wasn’t eager to reflect upon. She’d have to just hope.

“Here,” Rouge said, “have some tea.”

“Thank you,” Shara said, and Rouge was so handsomely imposing and fine and genteel that she dredged up a little bit more consideration. “I’m sorry I’m not standing on ceremony, I don’t know it and I’m--”

“Please,” Rouge said, with a rueful laugh, “don’t-- you’ve been in a state of crisis since before you got here, there’s been no time to stand on ceremony.” She gestured. “This is just tea, to drink. We do have a whole ceremony thing we do but this isn’t it.” She sat down across the little decorative table, and stirred her own cup of tea. “Let’s hope that at some point you have time to experience Alderaanian high culture like an honored visitor, with all of the stateliness and ceremony and so on and so forth, but, in the meantime, don’t fret that you’re not doing it justice.” She smiled, and picked up her cup of tea. “We’re an ancient civilization, we’ll surely keep doing this. You won’t miss out.”

It was warmly said enough that Shara managed to find at least the framework of a smile to return to her. “I’m glad at least to have found a safe haven for the moment,” she said. “I wasn’t keen on experiencing the miracle of birth in the back of a freighter somewhere between systems.”

“I don’t imagine so,” Rouge said, amusement crinkling the corners of her eyes. She was far too young yet for crow’s feet there, and the skin smoothed back out as she said, “Well, Alderaan is glad to be a safe haven.”

Shara held the cup between her hands, absorbing warmth. She was bone-achingly tired, numb all over, and a little light-headed, and her brain was occasionally giving her little emotional fits of whiplash: in this instant, she was desperate to check that her child was all right. She breathed, and it passed.

“I have known Kes all his life,” Rouge said. “I always admired how patient and sensible Kes was, because Leia in particular was never either of those things. He inspired her to behave much better than I ever did, even if sometimes high spirits got the better of him.”

“Norasol says they tortured him,” Shara said, unable to think of what else to say. It was such a pressure, behind her mouth, and she couldn’t push it aside to say the politely interested thing she was surely expected to come up with. “She says she could tell even from the little fragment of a holo they sent, you can see it in the way he flinched before he spoke.”

Rouge looked pained. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I don’t know a great deal about it, but I perceive you didn’t come here for platitudes and comfort. Should I tell you what little I know, then?”

Shara blinked at her. “Please?” she said.

Rouge nodded slightly, and stirred her tea one more time. “Well,” she said, and set her spoon down on a little spoon rest. “My brother-- Bail Organa--” she glanced up at Shara and nodded slightly, a tiny gesture that conveyed a whole wealth of social grace, a sort of _I’m sure you know, I don’t mean to patronize you, I’m just being clear,_ and Shara had a moment to envy that deep a practice of manners-- “has long been a patron of Lita Dameron and all of the Oaxctli refugees of Xicul-- the Organas have have long worked to resettle refugees from across the galaxy, and the Oaxctli have been a somewhat unusual case because they had such strong opinions on the matter of their own treatment. At any rate--” Rouge waved a hand. “Lita Dameron has made a big impression, to make matters brief. And so when Lita’s desperate interference on behalf of a Rebel cause attracted the attention of the Empire, my brother resolved to do all he could to help her.”

Shara made herself breathe out carefully; her own anger with Lita wasn’t helpful and she had been keeping it set aside. The woman’s injury meant she hadn’t had to speak to her in any depth, and she was grateful for that.

“Upon hearing that Kes had been taken, Bail reached out to one of the operatives within the Rebellion who has had prior dealings with the Oaxctli. His code name is currently Aach, but many years ago, he worked with a man you may or may not have known was Kes’s father.”

Shara shook her head slightly. “Kes told me his father was a drifter who didn’t come around much,” she said. “Later I found out that wasn’t true and it still sticks out to me as a strange thing to lie about.”

“Kes’s father was an operative in the Rebellion for a long time,” Rouge said. “His courage and ruthlessness advanced the cause more than we can ever fully acknowledge. Aach collaborated with him on numerous missions, and was present for the one that finally got him killed. He’s extremely good, one of our best, and we sent him after Kes. I won’t lie, he was sent to either recapture Kes or to kill him if he couldn’t be recovered, because we knew what kind of torture Kes would face and we wanted to spare him.”

Shara nodded. It was good to be told this, she hadn’t thought she’d want to hear it, but she did. “And also, so he wouldn’t give anything up,” she filled in.

“Well,” Rouge said, tilting her head a little. “For what it’s worth, it’s true that Kes knew nothing and had never had any prior involvement in the Rebellion. But the same could be said for many of us in this household, and yet I know as much as I do simply from being present and seeing who speaks to whom, and so on. The Empire could have forced Kes to testify about what little he knew, or could have forced him to lie for them, and it would have been convincing to the Imperial Senate, such as it is, given the long history of our family’s patronage of his people.”

Shara nodded again. “Kes would consider death a kinder fate, I think,” she said. She hadn’t known him that long, had only known such trivial things about him now that she dwelt on it-- what he liked to eat, what he liked in bed, his favorite songs, which of his shirts he wore first out of the wash, where he was ticklish, how he smiled when he didn’t like someone versus how he smiled for real. The Organas knew him better than she did, on this kind of wider, human level-- his politics, his handling of crises, his beliefs and his history. It was strange and alien and humbling to think, but Shara clung fiercely to what little she had of him. He’d chosen her, and that had to mean something. They’d created a new human out of their commingled genetic material, almost on purpose, and that _had_ to mean something.

“Well,” Rouge said, again, nodding. “His family-- he was raised, I think, with a constant awareness of… certain political realities, that I think a lot of people don’t… really consider so closely. His father, for example-- the fact that Kes so easily lied about that to you, when he is otherwise a very honest and transparent person. Surely you understand what that means, that it’s something he’s been so thoroughly grounded in all the ramifications of.” She gestured, a small graceful motion of one hand. “I never met Molo, but I knew his story, after the fact. Bail told it to us, especially to his daughters, as an example. Molo loved his family very much, cared deeply about them, but he left them completely. He had almost no contact with them, and most of them believed the lie, that he was shiftless and disinterested in fatherhood-- Kes himself believed it until he was old enough to be told the truth. How painful must that have been for Molo, to spend years of his life in exile knowing his name went unremembered among his kin?”

Shara breathed slowly out, and then in, and made herself take a drink from the cup of tea. It tasted of herbs, fresh and tangy like the way grass smelled, and it burst faintly sweet across the front of her tongue, and sourer, even a little bitter, toward the back. She was sure this was the kind of thing that aficionados and gourmets would be very excited about. She couldn’t possibly appreciate it like this, so she let it slide down her throat and nodded, slightly.

Leia, in that overheard conversation, had said that Aach would be giving Kes the “hard sell” about joining the Rebellion. Had said--

“Kes is going to think he has to do the same,” she said, realizing it all at once. “He’s going to absolutely believe that he now has to martyr himself to the cause, and will never be able to reunite with us.”

Rouge looked slightly surprised, eyebrows going up. “Why would he--” she said.

“I _know_ him,” Shara said, because she did. “He’s a self-sacrificing stupid son of a bitch. I won’t have him do this. I won’t have him decide what’s best for me and for my family just because his--” She managed to stop herself before she said anything terrible about Lita.

“Of course,” Rouge said, placatory. “Oh, Ms. Bey, your family’s been put in a terrible position. Of course it’s up to you to decide what to do next, but we don’t know yet-- Kes has choices, too, we don’t know what he’ll decide. He has to recover, and so do you.”

 _Ms_., Shara thought, because of course, they’d intended to file the marriage certificate here, when they arrived-- they couldn’t do that without Kes’s signature, and it would be stupid to do it now, to attract the attention of the Imperials, that this prisoner they’d just released-- but it meant she wasn’t his wife, meant that when she finally came up with a name and filed a birth registration for the baby he wouldn’t be recorded has having been the product of a legal marriage. Wouldn’t necessarily have his own father’s name on his birth registration.

Probably shouldn’t.

She should ask if Kes’s father’s name was on his birth registration. Surely he’d been registered.

Her own registration had been filed three years late and without a mother’s name. Shara wasn’t actually sure what her mother’s name had been. Oh, it wasn’t that Sento hadn’t told her, it just had literally never been important. _She had other priorities, sweetie,_ Sento had said, _and that’s no judgement on you at all, so don’t you worry about it._ Apart from a few hormone-fueled bouts of teenage angst, Shara never really had.

“How badly do you think they hurt him?” she asked, recollecting herself-- she’d drifted, a little, time had perhaps passed. Rouge’s cup of tea was nearly empty and she was watching Shara with evident concern.

Rouge set her tea cup down. “They almost certainly interrogated him by droid,” she said quietly. “Which involves chemicals to induce hallucinations and confusion, and electric stimuli to induce pain. In short-term use, it causes mild damage that usually heals. Under more intense usage, though, the droids tend to have debilitating aftereffects. The fact that Kes was coherent and speaking, both in the scrap of holo Aach sent, and in Aach’s descriptions in his report, indicates that he wasn’t subjected to intensive interrogation, but it might be too soon to tell. Aach did report that he believed that Kes had important information about the droids’ functions, however.”

Shara stared into her teacup. “Thank you for being honest with me,” she said faintly, because she was grateful for that. Most of her body felt very heavy and far away but there was a great tearing howling ache in the middle of her chest that just _wanted_ Kes, wanted to see him, wanted to touch him, wanted to feel his skin and hear his voice and see for itself that he was alive, and it was overwhelming, roaring in her ears and graying out the corners of her eyes.

Rouge’s hand was warm and solid against her forearm, and Shara noticed it from a distance at first, but it grew closer and more immediate until she managed to blink and look over at the other woman. “If you wanted to lie down for a few moments,” Rouge said, calm and reasonable and sweet, “I think you could use a bit of a rest.”

Shara shook her head slightly. “I’m just so _angry_ ,” she said quietly. “I could murder the Emperor with my teeth, I think.”

“I’ve no doubt you’d be capable,” Rouge said, “if wishing were sufficient to make it so. You’d certainly be justified.”

“Here,” Winter said, bustling into the room and startling Shara slightly, “here, I’ve managed-- there’s a holomessage, and I think this is all of it. I’m not certain, it’s a little glitchy, but I think this is the whole thing. There’s a written note too but it’s all mixed up in another-- I have to work longer to decode it. But here’s the holo.”

She had a datapad in one hand, that she pulled a little chip out of, and Rouge kept her hand on Shara’s arm as Winter cast about a moment and then came up with a little holoviewer. She set it on the table next to their teacups, and fed the chip in with practiced ease. After a moment, Kes’s face fuzzed up into view, quite close to the ‘corder.

He looked tired, cheeks hollow and unshaven, eyes shadowed. He looked straight into the ‘corder and said, voice very soft and hoarse, “I’m all right, I’ll be fine, but now it’s too dangerous for me to come to you. I’m sorry. I love you.” His eyes slid closed on the last phrase, and the clip cut off, clearly edited down for length; there was no wasted breath of time, no fumble of turning off the ‘corder.

Shara played the clip a second time, staring intently at Kes’s face, and stopped it just as his eyes slid shut, at “I’m sor--”

She stared at him, frozen, eyes closed, and played the clip for a fraction. “--rry. I lo--” he began, and she stopped it again, looking at the way his eyebrows were pulling together above his closed eyes, the line of pain between them.

“Self-sacrificing stupid son of a bitch,” Shara said. She rewound. “-- you. I’m sorry. I love you.” The clip ended.

Winter had sat down next to her and was continuing to work on the datapad, laboriously sorting through a block of text. She glanced up at Shara. “Aach’s follow-up report does confirm that Dameron’s mental state remains quite good. It seems that he did undergo very extensive sessions with the droids but has an unprecedented lack of brain damage, and Aach is working with him on really expanding our knowledge of the IT-0 droid program. That’s going to be incredibly good intelligence, I can’t tell you how badly we’ve needed it.” She gestured with the stylus she was using. “Of course that doesn’t make up for what he suffered at all, but as a kind of silver lining in the cloud, it’s invaluable. I’ll pull what I can that’s not sensitive and pass it on to you, if you like. I just figured I’d focus first on getting Kes’s message decoded, so I’m nearly done with that.”

“Winter,” Rouge said softly, repressively.

“It’s all right,” Shara said to her. Both of the Organa daughters were commendably bloody-minded and in another context, she’d have appreciated it more. Her whole body felt heavy, and now it was pressing down on her chest, like she was being pushed into the ground by some massive, unseen force. Kes’s holographic face, eyes closed, eyebrows pulled together in pain, flickered and glitched in front of her, unfathomably distant.

She knew better than to try to touch him, try to run her finger along the edge of his tense, unshaven jaw. Holos were insubstantial, poor substitutes for reality. She shut down the recording and looked at Rouge, who looked sad. “Did I call it or what?” she said. “Isn’t that exactly what I said he was going to say?”

Rouge let her breath out in a soft, sad sigh. “You did predict this,” she conceded. “Listen, Ms. Bey, this isn’t the first time we’ve had something like this happen. Your husband isn’t wrong to have reached the conclusions he has, but it’s certainly not so hopeless as that. My sister has been involved in resettling refugees for decades, she’ll know exactly how to assess the danger that the Empire would still be tracking him. Let me contact her, and we’ll see what can be done.”

“Almost,” Winter said, but she clearly wasn’t listening to them. She was absorbed in her datapad. “I’m almost-- let me just--”

“So he can’t come back here,” Shara said, “but we could go somewhere with him, where it’d be safe, is what you’re saying.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Rouge said. “This message is good news, because it confirms the earlier reports that your husband’s ordeal has left him in a condition he can recover from. So we can start with that. You can rest and heal and get to know your son, and let me and Celly work on finding a place for all of you to safely reunite.”

“In the meantime, though, where’s Kes going to be?” Shara asked.

Winter held out a hand without looking up from her datapad. Rouge made a fond, tolerant face that in one less refined might have been an eyeroll but on her imposing features was more of a fleeting upward impression of the face and gaze, and pulled the chip out of the holo-player, putting it into Winter’s hand. Winter took it without looking and inserted it back into her datapad. “Just,” she said, “about there.”

“You’d never know how many years of deportment lessons she took,” Rouge said fondly.

Shara rubbed her face wearily. “I can’t imagine why you think I’d care,” she said. “Don’t apologize. It takes a lot of focus to do what she’s doing, I don’t want her to slow down just so she can be nice to me. I won’t remember.”

“Fair point,” Rouge said.

“There you are,” Norasol said from the doorway, looking frazzled and distraught. “Xacristo, girl, what are you doing? You gave me a heart attack.”

“She was quite insistent,” the household staff member who’d shown Shara here said to Norasol. Norasol ignored him, and came into the room.

“Did you walk all this way? Shara!” Norasol looked terrible, her hair a frazzled mess and her face glistening with sweat and bloodless like she really was having a heart attack, hands clutched over her chest.

“Norasol,” Shara said, leaning forward, but she instantly knew that there was no way she was getting up. “Is something wrong?”

“I thought you were gone,” Norasol said, slumping a little, putting a hand to her chest. Shara gestured, and Norasol came over and sat next to her. “I thought-- I don’t know. What in the Mother’s name are you doing?”

“Princess Organa had a communication from Kes,” Shara said. “I’m waiting while she decrypts it.”

Winter looked up, blinking owlishly. “Here,” she said, and pulled the chip out, handing it to Shara. “Oh, hi, Norasol. Say, are you all right?”

“I’m fine now,” Norasol said. She put her hand on Shara’s face, ignoring the data chip. “You don’t look well at all, you should be resting.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell her,” Rouge said. “I think I’ll arrange for a hoverchair to get her back to your quarters.”

It was probably a good idea, so Shara didn’t protest. “You look worse,” Shara said. “Where ever did you think I’d gone?”

“I thought you might have done something stupid,” Norasol said. It struck Shara that she hadn’t really been keeping tabs on Norasol; it was possible she was not handling the current situation well at all, and it would be well to pay attention.

“I left the baby with Papa,” Shara said. “Is he all right?”

“They’re fine,” Norasol said, “but he didn’t know where you’d gone either. He’d been under the impression you were coming right back.”

“I was,” Shara said. She inserted the data chip, and pulled up the written message to display it.

_I hope all is well and the baby comes soon and safely. I can’t come to you where you are, or risk going anywhere you might go. I’m assumed to be in the Rebellion, so I might as well join. I will do what I can with them. I’ll try to stay in touch but it might be too dangerous. I’m sorry._

She read it twice. Norasol read it too, muttering a couple of the words out loud. “He didn’t write that,” she said. “He might have dictated it but he didn’t write that.”

“Aach probably transcribed it to encrypt it,” Winter said. “But why do you say that?”

“It’s not his phrasing,” Norasol said.

“I assure you, the message is genuine,” Winter said.

“So he’s joining the Rebellion,” Shara said to Rouge, ignoring the byplay. “So I don’t know what your sister can do with that, but it sounds pretty incompatible with refugee resettlement.”

Norasol turned to stare sharply at Rouge. “Your sister? Your sister Celly?” She didn’t sound pleased.

“Yes,” Rouge said, taken aback by her intensity.

Norasol laughed, low and humorless. “Maybe we’ll have better luck this time,” she said, “but Celly and I have had some rather serious disagreements in the past.” She wiped her face on her sleeve. Had she _run_ here?

“I had wondered,” Rouge said.

“Some of us don’t want to be parceled out into her ideal model communities,” Norasol said. “Some of us want to try to keep our old ways and don’t want to be improved. Celly means well but for a people to survive as a distinct cultural group, sometimes you have to leave them to their own devices far more than she was contented to do.”

“Ah,” Rouge said. “Yes, we’ve had-- you’re not the first to point that out.”

“The point is moot,” Shara said, wanting to get back to the matter at hand; she was fairly confident she would not be seeking resettlement as a refugee. The only reason she’d wanted to settle anywhere at all was because Kes was there, and without him, there was nothing interesting about it. They could discuss it without her. “Norasol, maybe he didn’t write that but he certainly recorded the holomessage, which is pretty similar in content.” She called it up.

Norasol made a little noise, most likely distress at how terrible Kes looked. Shara watched the illumination play along the stubble on his jaw as he spoke: she’d never seen him other than meticulously clean-shaven. The whites of his eyes were red like he’d been crying, maybe, or hadn’t slept. He looked awful, but he sounded like himself, and while the clip was cut short, it didn’t sound like it had been edited or spliced at all.

Norasol sighed heavily as the message ended. “No,” she said, “you’re right, that’s him, and he’s not speaking under coercion.”

Shara gave her a sidelong look. She’d assumed the same, but Norasol sounded certain. “Is there a code?”

“Closing your eyes if you say _love_ ,” Norasol said. “If he was forced to say it, he’d look straight into the ‘corder.”

Winter and Rouge were both staring at them, and Shara let that sink in for a moment. Norasol looked around at them, and smiled slightly. “I guess not everyone raises their children to resist interrogation,” she said, “but we have always known this was a danger. We’ve practiced how to behave under duress.”

“We know he’s not under duress, though,” Winter said, frowning.

Norasol smiled sweetly. “ _You_ know that, darling,” she said. “That doesn’t mean _I_ do.”

“Aach put himself in tremendous danger to rescue Kes,” Winter said, a little offended.

Norasol’s sweet smile didn’t waver. She looked, ageless, eternal, graven from stone. “You may not remember this, but I know Aach, from years ago,” she said. “He does what he does for the reasons he does it, and they are not altruism. I don’t doubt his dedication to the cause, but his cause and mine are not the same.”

“His cause is the Rebellion,” Winter said, coldly intense.

“The Rebellion is not a monolith,” Norasol said.

“Either way,” Shara put in, “Kes is joining it.”

“I’m sure he feels he has no choice,” Norasol said.

“Feel free to ask him that,” Winter said, a little more heated.

“I will,” Shara said.

“If you want to do it in writing you can use my datapad,” Winter said. “If you’d rather record a message, I have a holocam in the next room.”

Shara shook her head. “No,” she said, “I’m going to go and ask him in person.”

“It’s the only way to be sure,” Norasol said, wrapping her hand around Shara’s arm. Her serene expression hadn’t wavered but there was an odd tension in her neck, more power in her grip than was warranted, and Shara realized with some surprise that Norasol was-- desperate, or afraid, or something. Had been, this whole conversation. 

It was a startling change of perspective. Norasol  _wasn't_ a pilot, had no real freedom of motion here, and her partner was badly injured, and she was clearly more upset by all of this than she'd been letting on, this entire time. 

Winter looked taken-aback. “I,” she said, her anger abating somewhat. Then she smiled. “It will take some time to arrange that,” she said, clearly swallowing irritation.

“I’m a pilot,” Shara said. “I can figure it out.”

Winter’s smile went even thinner. “He’s being taken to one of our bases,” she said. “The location is secret. I’d have to get you clearance to know where it was.” She shook her head slightly. “I can arrange it, or, better, surely-- we can arrange for him to meet with you somewhere neutral and safe, of course we’ll do that anyway, I don’t know why we’re suddenly at odds in this matter.”

“We’re not at odds,” Shara said. “But I _know_ where the Rebel base is, Leia mentioned it was at Yavin. I looked it up, that’s way out on the Gordian Reach, but I know how to get there. It’s not a mystery.”

Winter stared at her, astonished and dismayed. “Why would Leia have told you that?”

Shara shrugged. “She wasn’t talking to me, but she said it like it was no big secret.”

“You still can’t just _go there_ ,” Winter said, clearly setting that aside to yell about later. “If for no other reason than that you can’t presently stand up.”

“I think we’re all getting a little ahead of ourselves,” Rouge interjected, and there was steel in her voice. “We are _not_ at odds, and Kes is not a prisoner. Nothing of his fate has yet been decided; it remains up to him. In the meantime, Ms. Bey and Ms. Yauta are _guests_ in our _home_ , and whatever their future plans may be, our first priority is that Ms. Bey have a safe and comfortable place to recover from giving birth to her son. I will countenance no further discussion on this, Princess: you have overstepped yourself.”

Winter looked surprised, then chastened. “Of course,” she said, subsiding. “I’m sorry-- I just get so fired up about-- of course we’re not holding your husband prisoner, but I can see how both you and he might think he has no choice. I will try to arrange at least a live direct holocall, if not better-- I just need time.” She picked up the holoplayer with the chip in it, and handed it to Norasol. “Here, in the meantime, at least, take this, the chip has both his messages on it. I’ll collect at least a reply from you, to send to him, before I assemble the next outgoing packet.”

Shara nodded slowly. There was a pause, and then she said, “About that hoverchair.”

Rouge laughed sympathetically. “It’s on its way,” she said.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Next up: Yavin IV. Anyone with any insight into what kind of days a moon orbiting a gas giant is going to have, feel free to hit me up, I've been giving myself a crash course in astronomy and it hasn't been going well at all.


End file.
